Definition of Better

We cannot get better unless we are really clear what better is. What is the change we want to make in the immediate future? I suspect that is getting in the way of most teams. I am confident at the same time, it would only require the right conversations to happen so we align everybody in the change we want to make.

In my experience asking hundreds of agile teams how better looks like for their team right here and right now, I get very vague answers, like “we are trying to improve our delivery”. I also get conflicting or even opposing answers coming from members of the same team. One of them would say “better is faster”, only to be interrupted by another saying “not really, better is more complete features”.

Of course better is contextual, it cannot be defined for all teams, but also it cannot be defined for a team in all circumstances. What is better, it is so for this team in this context at this time. Hence it is critical that the team understands what team they are aiming at becoming.

I try to help make those conversations happen, so I am describing here a facilitation tool that I have used successfully to engage many teams and their stakeholders in discussing what should be the focus of our improvements now.

Please notice this conversation does not attempt to clarify the problem to be resolved. We are not looking at the team current situation as the problem or from a point of view of inadequacy. There are no problem solving questions at the beginning of this conversation. Instead this conversation is one of discovery: of the many paths we could take now, which one does it look like the most promising direction for us? Where should we be trying to go?

These are the 5 questions I ask the team to explore in sequence together with their main stakeholders:

1. What does better look like for our team and in our current context? Ideally describe it as a direction or an amount that can be varied (i.e. the more of this, the better). Only on the rare situation when your team cannot really figure out a way to express it as a directional aim after you have put some serious effort into it, alternatively express it as a clear goal (i.e. better is achieving this by this date)
2. How will we know if we have improved? That is, how will we know if we won the game? We call this the lagging indicator or the score of the game.
3. What is currently limiting us from achieving that better state? What is the challenge to get closer to that better? What is the likely bottleneck or the major contributing factors when several exist?
4. What can we try changing to overcome or reduce the impact of our limiting bottleneck or challenge?
5. What will indicate we are taking those actions effectively as soon as possible? How will we know early on if we are getting likely to get later the effects we want on the score of the game? We call these 2 types of metrics the leading indicators. They are part of the scorecard too.

The agreed answers to these questions, are written down as the Definition of Better, and should be kept visible to the team at all times, and be perused in the conversations concerned with what to do, and where to concentrate their efforts.

I also recommend teams to keep the scorecard defined as part of the exercise, updated and visible to them at all times.

The definition of better should be revisited often, challenged and changed when appropriate. It is not a forever artefact.

You can see some examples of better here.